stories of Constance, Griselda, and Virginia: the two first of which may be justly described as tales of morality. The Franklin tells the old Breton lay of Dorigen and Arviragus, models of chivalrous virtue. The Prioress and the Second Nun relate holy legends of martyrdom. These are "the gentles," and such are their tales. The tales of vulgar merriment are told by the Miller, the Reeve, the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Summoner, the Merchant, the Shipman. And as regard is had to the condition of the narrator in the character of the tale ascribed to him, so the persons engaged in degrading adventure are below the rank of the gentles. Januarius, indeed, in the Merchant's Tale, is called a worthy knight; but he is a blind dotard, long past knightly exercise and knightly feeling: and his May, who is so easily won to play him false, is represented as a maiden of small degree. The rank of all the other befooled heroes is plain: they are a carpenter, a miller, a summoner, a friar, and a merchant.1 The gentle order is respected. They join the company, and enjoy the ribald speech and behaviour of their riotous, inebriated, vulgar companions; but they do not forfeit their self-respect, by contributing a share to the noisy merriment. When they have had enough of it, or when the tales threaten to become too boisterous, they use their influence to give a more sober tone to the proceedings. They do not break rough jests on each other as the vulgar do. And mine host knows his place sufficiently well to be less familiar and imperious with them than with the Miller and the Cook; he is courteous to the Knight, and ludicrously over-polite to the Prioress.

I may seem to have insisted too much on this distinction between the "gentles" and the "roughs" in the Canterbury pilgrimage; but the truth is, that we cannot have too vivid a hold of this distinction if we wish to understand either the 'Canterbury Tales,' or Chaucer's poetry generally. Unless we realise this, we cannot feel how thoroughly and intimately his poems are transfused with chivalrous sentiment. What is more, we cannot appreciate the perfect skill with which he has maintained this sentiment in the Canterbury Tales,' and at the same time transferred to his pages a faithful representation of vulgar manners in their wildest luxuriance.

Waiving all questions as to whether Chaucer was most of Norman or of Saxon, of Celt or of Teuton, we cannot escape from

1 Observe, in passing, another evidence of Chaucer's sense of courtly propriety in his Troilus and Cressida. The knights and ladies that heard his poems read would not have tolerated Shakespeare's representation of Pandarus, one of the knights of Troy, as a gross procurer, or of Cressida, a lady of rank, as an incontinent wanton. Chaucer's Pandarus is an accomplished knight, moved to his questionable service by pity for the despair of his friend; Cressida the loveliest, most refined, and most discreet of widows, overcome by passionate love, dexterous intrigue, and favouring accidents.

admitting that he was deeply impressed with the wide difference between chivalrous sentiments and the sentiments and manners prevalent among the dependants of chivalry. The difference may not have in reality been so profound as it was in ideal but Chaucer felt it deeply. How deeply, we see most clearly in the "Cuckoo and Nightingale," and the "Parliament of Birds," where the antagonistic sentiments are placed in express contrast. The Cuckoo is a vulgar bird, and takes gross ridiculous views of love: the Nightingale is a gentle bird, and regards love with delicate seriousness. Similar types are represented, with greater epic variety, in the "Parliament of Birds." There is no mistaking the contrast in these allegorical fables; the vulgar birds, the Water Fowls, the Seed Fowls, and the Worm Fowls, are sharply snubbed for their chuckling vulgarity by the haughty and refined Birds of Prey. But in the Canterbury Tales' the poet has achieved the triumph of making the antagonistic sentiments work smoothly side by side, and that is really their main triumph as a broad picture of manners and character. There, with dignified carriage, are seen the type of men and women whose sensibilities were trained to appreciate the tender refinement of Chaucer, and who allowed themselves more boisterous entertainment only under decorous pretexts, listening without participating. Side by side, following their own humours with noisy independence, are their vulgar associates, stopping at every ale-stake to eat and drink, half choked with ribald laughter, finding in the contrast between themselves and the reserved gentles an additional incentive to their gross open mirth. The 'Canterbury Tales' embody two veins of feeling that powerfully influenced the literature of the fifteenth century-the sentiment that fed on chivalrous romances, and the appetite for animal laughter that received among other gratifications the grotesque literature of miracle-plays.

If we fail to perceive this contrast between the serious and the ludicrous side of the Canterbury pilgrimage, if we miss the poet's reconciliation of the two without repression of either, Chaucer's genius, in so far as regards manners and character, has laboured for us in vain. A dead weight flattens his figures into the page. The exquisite delicacy of his delineation is confused. We drag down the Knight and the Prioress by involving them in the responsibility of the Miller's Tale: we crush the life out of the Miller and the Summoner, and reduce them to wretched tameness by supposing them to fraternise with the Knight in a certain amount of decorous restraint. The pilgrimage becomes a muddled, jumbled, incoherent, unintelligible thing.

We must not, however, allow our attention to two large divisions, however much that may be the key to a right understanding of the Canterbury Tales,' to make us overlook the varied

types that lie within these divisions. Every character, indeed, is typical Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Sergeant of Law, Franklin, Cheapside Burgess, Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic, Wife of Bath, Parson, Ploughman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner: and the characteristics of their various lines of life are drawn as no other generation has been in equal space. I shall not attempt to pick out supreme examples of Chaucer's skill. The compression of masterly touches in that Prologue can hardly be spoken of in sane language: there is not one of the seven or eight hundred lines but contains something to admire.

Apart from the skill of the delineation, one typical individual is specially interesting from his relations to the time, and that is the poor Parson. He cannot be said to belong, in rank at least, to the gentle class: he is of poor extraction, the brother of the Ploughman. He represents the serious element among the lower classes. During the riot of the pilgrimage, he is put down and silenced. He ventures to rebuke the Host for his profane language, and is jeered at and extinguished by that worthy as a Lollard. But when the ribald intoxication of the road has exhausted itself, his grave voice is heard and respected: and he brings the pilgrims into Canterbury with a tale more in harmony with the ostensible object of their journey.

45

CHAPTER II.

CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS.

I.-ENGLISH CONTEMPORARIES.

(1332-1400?)

1. WILLIAM LANGLAND-Piers the Plowman.

THIS chapter deals with second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate poets or versifiers who flourished from the time of Chaucer down to the early part of the sixteenth century. Chaucer had no worthy rival among his contemporaries, and no English poet worthy to be placed by his side appeared before the time of Spenser. Still, it is well to characterise the poets of this sober interval, however humble. The task may be dreary, but we cannot always live with the great minds, and we are rewarded by the study of mediocrities with a more vivid sense of the beauty and strength of their betters.

The most noteworthy of Chaucer's contemporaries was William Langland, author of the 'Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman,' commonly known as the 'Vision of Piers Plowman.' Not much is ascertained about his life. Mr Skeat1 considers it probable that he was born about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer; that he wrote the first version of his poem (the A-text) in 1362, the second version (the B-text) in 1377, and the last version (the Ctext) between 1380 and 1390; that he wrote a poem on the Deposition of Richard II.; and that he did not long survive the accession of Henry IV. He is generally supposed to have been a secular priest. It is obvious that he was familiar with London; and it

1 See his elaborate Introduction to the Clarendon Press selection, and his editions of the various texts for the Early English Text Society. Mr Skeat accepts the argument of Professor C. H. Pearson ('North British Review,' April 1870) that the poet's name was Langley.

may be inferred, from his mention of the Malvern Hills, that he lived at one time in their neighbourhood.

Langland wrote in the old English alliterative metre; but he went to the fashionable modern poetry for the machinery of dream and allegory. He walks abroad on a May morning, like any poet of the period, lays himself down by a stream under a broad bank, and as he looks into the water, is lulled to sleep by the merry sound. He then dreams, and sees an allegorical field, full of folk; an allegorical tower, and an allegorical dale, with a dungeon. He is visited by a supernaturally lovely allegorical lady, who explains the meaning of what he sees. He is next witness of an allegorical drama; an allegorical marriage is proposed, the banns are forbidden, the whole party is carried before the king; and, after several symbolical incidents, judgment is pronounced. Wishing now to change the scene, the poet awakes his dreamer, and presently sends him asleep again, and opens up to him the vision of the Seven Deadly Sins, and of Piers the Plowman. The same artifice for changing the scene is used nine other times in the course of the poem.

But though the machinery of the poem reminds us that Langland had read in the same school of poetry as Chaucer, he writes in a very different spirit. The author of Piers the Plowman was the Carlyle of his generation. He may be said to be the complementary opposite of Chaucer. His criticism of life is stern. He refuses to enter the Garden of Mirth, which Chaucer was unwilling to quit; he holds the mirror up to the ugliness, the misery, the discontent to be found outside this pleasant habitation. Chaucer and Langland furnish our first examples of the conflict between sensuous art and Puritanism. Langland is not a rabid Puritan— he is not a rabid man; but he regards the votaries of the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes mournfully as deluded victims, and he denounces all minstrels and mirth-makers as heartless insulters of the miseries of the world. With what scorn he must have read, if he did read, the Legends of the Saints of Cupid! Langland would have used even stronger language towards such a work, than Milton used towards Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia," when he called it “a vain amatorious poem. He makes no distinction between wandering minstrels and other purveyors for idle luxury; he scorns them collectively with no less vehemence than the Puritans of the seventeenth century scorned the strolling player. Langland was far from having Milton's genius to tempt him into violations of his own doctrine; but he had some difficulty in reconciling even the modest flights of his muse with his paramount and imperious moral earnestness. He had qualms about "meddling with makings," when he might have been saying his psalter or praying for his benefactors; and